Wednesday marks the first 100 days of the second Trump administration – that notional period in which presidencies are supposed to define themselves, set down the main themes for the remainder of the term, fire off the key legislative initiatives to be worked through for the remainder of the term.
You are not wrong if you think it’s been an exhausting whirlwind of initiatives and orders.
By the time he set off for Rome on Friday, the President had signed 137 Executive orders. His predecessor Joe Biden had signed 42. This was not laziness on Biden’s part – it was the highest number of Executive Orders in the first 100 days of any president since Harry Truman in the 1940s.
In his first term, Trump signed 32 Executive Orders in the first 100 days, 55 for the whole first year.
So his rate of signing Executive Orders is exceptionally high. In fact you have to go back to Franklin D Roosevelt – the president who coined the term “the first 100 days”, to get a comparable frenzy of orders from the Oval office. Former President Roosevelt managed 99 in the first hundred days of his first term.
Sixteen of these orders are being challenged in the courts, nine have been injuncted. Most of the signing ceremonies are carried out as live press conferences on TV, an opportunity for the president to tell people what he is doing.
Promises made, promises kept. So how come his poll numbers are so bad?
A poll for Fox News last week put his overall favourability rating at 44% – the lowest of any president in the 21st Century at this stage in their term. The previous lowest was President Trump in his first term, when he scored 45%. Bush and Obama scored in the 60s at the same stage.
His disapproval rating in the fox poll was 55%. He had disapproval for Foreign Policy (54%) Economic Policy (56%), tariff policy (58%) and inflation (59%). The only area where he scored favourably was border control, where 55% approved of the president’s policy.
Still it didn’t stop him from revealing live on Fox News the latest MAGA product for sale – a red hat with the words “Trump 2028” on the front: apparently defying the 22nd amendment’s ban on presidents being elected for a third term (a ban introduced in 1945 after the aforementioned Franklin Roosevelt had won four consecutive elections to the presidency: Grant, Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt have all sought third terms, but were nixed by their party conventions: George Washington set the benchmark by refusing a third term).
The other “live polling” systems are the markets – equities, which a big majority of ordinary Americans own directly, and bonds – the sovereign debt of the US government, all $36 trillion of it. And indeed the dollar itself, backed by the “full faith and credit” of the US government.
All of these vital indicators have been moving in the same direction as the president’s opinion polling – the wrong direction.
The problem seems to be the economy – his supposed strong point.
Impacts started to break into the real world – starting with that most consumer focused website of all, Amazon – a giant electronic intermediary between Chinese factories and American consumers – which is seeing prices rise in ways attributable only to tariffs.
Read more: Little fear but much confusion over Trump’s computer chip tariffs
Smartscout, a price analysis software tool, found that in the second week of April, Amazon raised prices on 1,000 products, with an average price hike of 30%. Smartscout’s CEO told CBS News it was a concerted hike “where nothing explains the hike other than tariffs.”
Amazon says the Smartscout figures are skewed by a small number of goods in the sample having a big price rise, and that most of the hikes were around 6%.
So there it is – tariffs, a tax on imports, passed on to consumers, delivered straight to your doorstep.
And to your big box retailer. Or rather not delivered. The bosses of Walmart, Target, Home Depot and several others contacted President Trump on Monday and told him they were weeks away from empty shelves in their stores.
Shipping rates from China to the US west coast have collapsed by 64% as stuff is just not being sent. Layoffs among dockworkers in Los Angeles as well as truck drivers and railway workers who deliver the containers of Chinese made goods around the country seem inevitable in the land of the quick fire.
And not just Chinese made goods. Pepsi, the fast food and soft drinks company told the stock market on Thursday its earnings were going to be hit by tariffs – 25% on aluminium for drink cans, and 10% on the concentrate for its cola and other soft drinks, almost all of which is made in Ireland. It’s not just Botox and Viagra, folks.
The retail bosses seem to have had an impact on Mr Trump. The very next day his treasury secretary Scott Bessent was telling a closed door meeting of bigshot wall street investors hosted by JP Morgan that there was going to be a deal with China soon, and that the tariff war with China was “unsustainable”.
A market rally began when someone at the meeting let Bloomberg News know what had been said.
But in the half hour between the closed door briefing and the market becoming aware of the information, someone had made $2m on a trade that had been executed in the timeframe, according to research by the social media account Unusual Whales.
As the euphoria around an apparent relaxation of the China trade war died down, questions began to be asked.
The White House – and especially the president himself – kept talking the prospects of a Chinese deal up over the next three days. And other trade deals too (no I haven’t forgotten the tariff hike on EU products – I like my Kerrygold as much as any green blooded Irishman).
The markets were soothed – but still volatile. Talk will only get you so far.
The Chinese denied the president’s claims that US officials were in negotiations with China on a trade deal. As did Secretary Bessent, who has emerged as the key figure in trying to retrieve the tariff fiasco, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik.
Shifting some papers on my desk on Friday, I found a page from the Wall Street Journal I had put aside.
It was a report, dated 17 January, from Mr Bessent’s Senate Finance Committee hearing prior to his confirmation.
In the hearing he spoke openly about the planned tariffs that the president had mentioned throughout his election campaign, saying they would have three purposes: first to address “unfair trade practices” by other countries; second, to raise revenues for the Federal budget, and offset some of the costs of continuing the tax cuts brought in during the president’s first term; thirdly, tariffs could be used as negotiating tools, sometimes for non-trade reasons – such as pressuring Mexico to clamp down on illegal migration at the southern border.
An alternative to economic sanctions, Mr Bessent said. He also said there should be more sanctions on Russia and its energy sector, and the US should reverse the global corporate tax deal that set 15% as the minimum rate.
So the tariff threat was always a real one. It was going to happen. But nobody was prepared for the scale or the bizarre way they were calculated, implemented, then partially unimplemented, then a 90-day trade negotiation window was opened.
The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said tariffs would cause inflation, which would force the Fed to keep interest rates higher for longer to damp down demand – this is to say, raise the cost of money for things like mortgages and car loans, so people and companies spend less until inflation comes down.
The president turned against him, suggesting he should resign, calling him a loser for not cutting rates.
This spooked markets again, the fear of a key central bank losing its independence to a volatile political figure and the damaging effect this would have on the value of the US dollar and the credibility of the Central Bank.
Last week Powell spoke again, saying the tariffs were higher than expected, and therefore the negative impacts would be higher, notably in prices and unemployment. He seems to have faced down the President, who was forced to tell markets he was not going to sack the Central Bank boss.
Also during the week the IMF published its latest World Economic Outlook, in which it said economic growth would be badly hit by the US tariff regime, especially growth in the US. Before the tariffs it expected GDP growth of 2.8% for this year – with the regime announced on 2 April, that growth would fall to 1.8%. In money terms, that’s over three hundred billion dollars.
Treasury Secretary Bessent had some harsh words about the International Monetary Fund this week, saying the institution should stick to its core mission of financial stability, not straying into areas like gender and environment. Such talk is course misdirection – a clue that the administration wants you to look elsewhere.
In the case of the IMF, they don’t want you to look at the central message of its latest economic forecast – that the Trump Tariffs are bad for America, bad for China, bad for the entire world (estimated at reducing forecast EU economic growth by a fifth: the only possible upside in this was that falling oil prices and falling demand would lower inflation to 2% faster, leading to faster interest rate cuts – good news for bad reasons).
Mr Bessent was in the room with Minister for Finance (and Eurogroup President) Paschal Donohoe at the IMF, who pressed home the “tariffs are bad” message (he did the same at the White House with the chairman of the president’s economic advisors Kevin Hassett).
It’s the latest in a run of high level contacts by Irish ministers, including Tánaiste Simon Harris meeting Howard Luttnik (straight after Luttnik and Bessent had convinced the president to suspend tariffs above the 10% level for 90 days), and Agriculture Minister Martin Heydon’s visit to Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary.
This Trump presidency is infinitely better prepared for office than his first.
The four year preparation by the America First think tank, set up specifically to plot an agenda for a second Trump term on 7 January 2021 (and led by Brooke Rollins), and the massively detailed Project 2025 playbook compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a long established and well-resourced conservative think tank, meant there was a plan in place well before the election.
Personnel were lined up ready to step into leadership roles in the administration – unlike eight years ago. So everything was ready for the president to hit the ground running and get things done.
And he did. With massive energy and enthusiasm. And his teams did the same, working to a game plan, they have wrought huge change across the US government, pushing through the president’s agenda, setting wheels in motion all over the system. For better or worse, things are happening.
But while the government is forging ahead on all fronts, pleasing supporters and enraging opponents, vulnerabilities have opened up.
This looks increasingly like a government that is running out of administrative capacity to process and digest all the initiatives it has set in motion. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the area of trade.
Trade deals normally take years, sometimes decades to come to fruition. The notion – popularised by Peter Navarro – that the administration will do 90 deals in 90 days with 90 different countries looks challenging, to say the least.
Even the idea of concentrating on 18 deals with US allies like the EU, Japan and Korea is a stretch – if by a trade deal we mean the complex, complicated regulation bound multi-volume agreements that constitute what the EU (and most other states) understands as a trade deal.
If it means buying US energy to close a nominal trade deficit that can be haggled about, then maybe.
But even that is a big ask in the time frame allotted. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is thinking of running an intense three week period of trade talks, taking its 18 most important trading partners in batches of six and thrashing out deals.
Again, this does not sound in any way realistic if the objective is to break down non-tariff barriers and technical regulations: trade is a two way street, its complex legally, politically and economically.
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And while strong arm tactics have their place in either starting or closing out deals, they are not the way to proceed. And there is always the danger that someone else has stronger arms.
Certainly China seems intent on facing down the US tariffs, calculating that empty supermarket shelves in America will do far more damage to Trump than Xi.
On top of the trade war and its hastily contrived deadline, there are real wars that the president is pushing ahead with plans to solve. Notably there is Ukraine, which he said he wanted ended within his first 100 days. That’s Wednesday, remember?
But there are others. His Middle East Envoy, Steve Witkoff, is also his point man on Ukraine, and met President Putin in Moscow on Friday.
On Saturday he held talks with the Iranians – the president wants to do a deal that will prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb or the capacity to make one – whilst also holding out the prospects of a great golden age for the Iranian people by bringing the country back into the international system.
And then there is Mr Witkoff’s “day job” – the Middle East itself, where Gaze is still a blazing inferno.
And that’s before we mention internal policies, notably immigration control, which has veered from success to controversy, with the FBI arresting a judge on Friday for allegedly preventing the arrest of an illegal immigrant being the latest controversy in an area that is starting to see more protest.
The first 100 days have been very eventful – the next thousand are the hard part.
